So, Matson already picked up on this a bit last Friday, but it's something I've been thinking about as well (even if Decibel Fest kinda of killed all my deep thinking time over the weekend): the perennial problem of authenticity.

Matson touches on my recent reviews of the Head and the Heart opening for Vampire Weekend at the Paramount, and I've included some discussion of that after the jump here. Also mentioned is sometimes Stranger contributor Brandon Ivers' XLr8R cover story on "witch-house" darlings SALEM (about which much of the online discussion centers around: "are they really art school fuckheads or are they just acting like art-school fuckheads?!").

But what I've been thinking about lately in regards to authenticity is the Pitchfork Reviews Reviews guy, a semi-anonymous blogger who first made a semi name for himself by, yes, reviewing Pitchfork's reviews of records (the schtick got him profiled in the New York Times). Since then, he's largely abandoned that gimmick and started transitioning into writing more diaristic reviews of going to shows and parties in NYC. One such review, of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs playing a supposedly cred-recapturing Todd P show for their 10th anniversary, was recently published by the Awl:

soon Yeah Yeah Yeahs get on stage and Karen O is draped in a fabric that looks like it is covered in enlarged barcodes and she is wearing a gas mask and she holds the microphone up like a torch and pulls the mask off and brings the microphone down to her mouth and yelps into it, and then she grabs a bottle of Poland Spring and drinks some and cocks her head back and then spits the water up into the air, which is the same thing i watched her do on stage at a festival at Jones Beach in 2003 and the other two times i've seen them too, and i can only assume she's done it several hundred or thousand other times too

and knowing that Karen O will spit water up into the air regardless of her mood disarms the thrill of its spontaneity. i think it is supposed to seem like Karen O spits water up into the air because she just FEELS LIKE IT because she's just that badass, and staying adequately hydrated is not a concern to a punk art star of her stature, but if she does it every night it is part of an act, which feels disingenuous given the ostensibly spontaneous free-spirited rebelliousness of spitting water up into the air

The post tries to make some grand claims about "selling out" and "street cred" and such, which might be true but which to me just sound more like the way a band might deal with nostalgia in general, success or failure or cred aside. But the above bit is what most interests me. I've seen Karen O do that bit, as well, and at the time I didn't really think about whether it was some spontaneous act or not, I just thought, "oh, well, yeah, that looks pretty cool" (although it's hard to make physical stunts look cool next to those giant eyeballs). But that's the thing, maybe once upon a time Karen O did spout water spontaneously but it's since been codified and made into recreation. Everything that happens onstage is an act rather than the "authentic" thing, and maybe the bigger the stage the bigger the ratio of act-to-authenticity, but even that which happens on the smallest basement stage is performance.

It's also funny because a lot of the discussion I've read of the Pitchfork Reviews Reviews guy centers around authenticity as well—is he really this naive and breathlessly unable to punctuate and capitalize, or is he putting on a show? It's probably a little bit of both, but it's always a losing game to try to untangle intention, and anyway whatever happens on the page, like the stage, is the act. And on some level, you either dig the act or you don't. I dig Vampire Weekend's act (in some part because I sense them winking about it); I don't dig the Head and the Heart (in some part because I feel like they really want you to believe); I'm not so into Pitchfork Reviews Reviews' act (mostly for reasons unrelated to ideas/negotiations of authenticity).

Vampire Weekend get accused of in-authenticity all the time, for everything from borrowing from African music (unlike the rest of American pop/rock, amirite, Brian?) to being supposedly too well-off or educated to play in a rock band. (You'd think we would have dispensed with both these arguments back in the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion '90s.) But one of the great things about Vampire Weekend is that they explicitly, transparently deal with these issues of authenticity in their songs. They sing about negotiating issues of class and authenticity (see "California English," much of Contra); they shout out Lil Jon and draw attention to both their own appropriations and the fact that we live in an open-source cross-pollinating time in pop culture; they sample post-globalization pop star M.I.A. who samples the Clash who sampled reggae which was really just Jamaica's reaction to pop radio picked up from the Southern United States to begin with. Most of all, though, they sing about negotiating the space between archness and sincerity, a shifting emotional gray area we all live with—and this, to me, is what makes them seem like a genuinely authentic band in what some trend-piece pitchers might dubiously call our "post-authentic" era.

Matson summarizes my reaction to openers the Head and the Heart:

In a concert review on The Stranger's Line Out blog, Eric Grandy writes he doesn't like Ballard roots-pop band The Head and the Heart partly because of what he interprets as its "stagey sincerity." He watched the band open for Vampire Weekend at the Paramount last Saturday.

Grandy doesn't exactly call the Head/Heart disingenuous, but touches on the fact that in general, every performer wears KISS makeup, even if it's the makeup of no makeup.

I like that. Although, of course, I doubt Matson's sincerity.